Lunar Drop Zone

Lunar base requires many sorties from earth to moon. Therefore, developing a new rocket architecture is a necessity. I will discuss about it on my next article. This article is about minimizing the cost of each lunar delivery. I propose a lunar drop zone like in the military where personnel or equipment may be delivered by parachute or by free drop. Due to lack of atmosphere on the moon, the drop zone will be a free drop area.

On the image you can see tilted Hawke crater, the impactor that excavated it struck the sloping inner wall of Grotrian crater. Tilted crater is an ideal drop zone. It would allow a hollow travel area for a free-falling object with a horizontal speed. The lunar orbit velocity for the Apollo missions was a little over 1600 meters per second (5760 km/h). This is faster than the speed of a bullet ~3000 km/h. As a result, I propose the lunar cargo container to have a small rocket as well. This rocket would be a fixed-thrust hypergolic rocket engine like the one used on lunar module ascent engine (LMAE). It would be fired close to impact to slow down and maneuver the cargo to the drop zone. It would be a much simpler and smaller rocket engine compared to a direct descent engine. The web like drop zone would catch and stop the cargo safely.

The drop zone would be made of web like impact absorber. A spider like lunar bot would screw poles on the lunar regolith. Then carbon nanotube (CNT) fibers would be attached across these poles using special springs. These springs would absorb the impact over the CNT fibers. After the cargo is caught, the tilt of the crater would be used to roll the cargo down to the lunar base with minimum energy.